There are two main kinds of person-to-person communication using, a computer; email and various forms of real-time chat, also known as instant messaging. Instant messaging systems allow people to type messages to one another and for those messages to appear almost instantaneously on the addressee's display screen. Such systems enable a more natural interaction and discussion to take place than is possible via email.
As users type, their chat system creates a “chat transcript” showing what each user says. The format is typically “name: speech” (e.g. Nicki: What time are you lunching?). The collected messages exchanged during a chat can be viewed as a chat conversation.
The chat transcript is typically stored locally at each client participating in a chat. Each participant's chat transcript typically displays messages that are generated once a participant joins the chat. If a participant joins the chat but is then is distracted, messages generated by other participants may scroll off the screen and effectively become “lost” to the distracted participant. Unless current participants paraphrase what happened before a participant joined or while the participant was distracted, that participant may miss part of the discussion and have trouble catching up while the discussion continues.
Technology for summarizing information is already known. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,532 teaches the summarization of a threaded discussion while US Patent Application Publication 2004/0122657 discloses techniques for interactive topic-based summarization in which sentences are selected for inclusion in a topic based summary based on associated high scores resulting from, for example, a sentence's placement in a piece of text.
However, there is a need in the industry for improved techniques for summarizing text.